ALCHEMY AND INVENTION

Evening Star, Issue 18833, 6 January 1925, Page 6

ALCHEMY AND INVENTION

Since the first fallen angels found brides on earth and taught them alchemy men have been trying to turn base metals into gold, says the ‘Now York World.’ The Greeks tried it, the Arabs tried it, the priests of Egypt thought they had the secret in the days of Ptolemy the First. Now a modest item appearing in the papers suggests that New York University will have its turn. Amperage enough to “crack” an atjorn of quicksilver will attempt to eliminate the eightieth electron from billions of atoms and leave a residue of gold. “Wo believe,” says one of the experimenters, “UJiat the effort will bo successful," A few strands run through nil history and tie us to our start. One of the stoutest of them is man’s tireless conviction that creatures so superior as we are to the quadrupeds must be wise enough to find a way of making gold. All ages have grubbed in chemicals to find the secret. There were the Greeks who _ thought that if base metals could be boiled down to their essence it would be possible to boil them up to gold again. There were Arabs who %vere hunting for philosopher s stones 500 years before Mohammed, and Alexandrians who thought a pinch of salt in sulphur would make gold. A dozen empires must have fallen since the first Chaldean confided to his friends that he knew how it was done. There has never been a search since men began to think which broke so many hearts and ate up so much effort. Yet our age is the last to say that the time of many disappointed men was wasted. If modern science can pick up the trail to-day with all the equipment of the modem laboratory, if it can briim quartz lamps _ and electric power into play, whom has it to thank if not the early alchemists? Blundering tojgnd one special metal, they produced a science. There is not a stick of forged steel on Lower Broadway or a blue dye in a summer shirt but owes remotely its existence to the single-minded men who could nat be argued from their search for gold. The world crawls crabwiso towards its knowledge.